Editors are describing press releases as ‘AI-generated’, even when AI hasn’t been involved in the writing process. Rather than making a literal judgement about authorship, they are more likely reacting to the fact that when generative AI makes polished writing effortless and accessible to all, credibility now comes from evidence that only the organisation itself could provide.
Key takeaways
• When editors say a press release ‘sounds AI-generated’, they are usually questioning the strength of its evidence, not how it was written.
• Fluent writing has become the baseline. Distinctive, verifiable information is now what makes content stand out.
• Corporate approval processes sometimes remove exactly the details that make a story feel credible to journalists.
• The real shift is bigger than AI. Communications is increasingly judged on the quality of its evidence rather than the quality of its prose.
Imagine spending hours interviewing engineers, checking technical details, refining the language, and carefully navigating multiple rounds of internal approval. The copy is clear, the grammar is faultless, and the messaging aligns perfectly with the business’s objectives. You send the final press release to a trade journalist and a few minutes later, the response comes back: “It reads like AI.”
You know no AI was involved. You could show the tracked changes proving every paragraph was written, challenged, and refined by actual people. But arguing about authorship misses what the editor is really telling you. They aren’t saying they think a machine wrote it. They’re saying they no longer trust polished writing on its own, and that is a very different problem.
Flowing copy is not enough to build trust
For years, good writing and credibility reinforced one another. If something was clear, confident, and well structured, readers were naturally more inclined to trust it. Today, fluent writing has become abundant. Increasingly, some of it has been produced with AI and some of it hasn’t but from the outside, that distinction often doesn’t matter.
Because fluency itself is no longer a useful signal of credibility. Instead of: “Is this well written?”, they’re asking: “What convinces me this is true?” That is why genuinely human-written press releases are sometimes dismissed as ‘AI-generated’. The criticism is rarely about software. It is about proof.
Content that can’t be imitated by AI or competitors
Credible content often carries the unique fingerprints of an organisation: a named project engineer, a specific field-trial location, performance data, or real operational challenges. None of these details make the copy more elegant but they anchor it in reality.
By contrast, a press release built around broad market claims, anonymous customer references, and familiar corporate positioning may read well, but it asks an editor to trust a brand without giving them a deeper reason to do so. In newsrooms facing mounting pressure on time and resources, that’s an instant filter for whether a story is considered for publication or not.
The quickest editorial test is brutally simple: Could a competitor in your sector replace its name with yours and publish almost exactly the same press release? If the answer is yes, the problem is not the writing. It’s that the story contains too little that belongs uniquely to your organisation. Every answer to the essential journalistic questions – What happened? Why now? Who says so? – must move the content away from corporate messaging and closer to genuine journalism.
The details everyone wants are also often the hardest to publish
Despite this, every communications team faces the reality that precisely the evidence that makes a story most appealing to an editor are frequently the most difficult to get approved internally. For example, sales teams might want to redact a customer’s name to protect an account from competitors or legal teams might want to remove specific performance metrics to reduce risk.
By the time the content has been finalised, many details that would have made the story unmistakeably real have been removed and that’s how a carefully written press release can tip into looking like generic algorithmic output. Editors never see the internal debates about what to include and what to omit and nor should they, but they can only make judgments on information placed in front of them.
A bigger shift in how professional influence is earned
It would be easy to see this as another conversation about generative AI, but we believe this points to something much broader. Communications has spent decades competing largely on persuasion but now it is competing increasingly on evidence and that affects far more than media relations. It impacts thought leadership, executive visibility, websites, search discoverability, and corporate reputation.
Across every one of those disciplines, the same principle is becoming more important: not simply saying something well but showing why people should believe it.
Hannah Kitchener
Associate Director
About the author
Hannah is an associate director in the UK, leading strategic campaigns for industrial clients across the EMEA region. A professionally qualified journalist (NCTJ), she combines specialist sectoral knowledge in construction, energy, and materials handling with a strong network of trade media contacts to secure valuable coverage. Her expertise in inter-cultural communication, honed by degrees in modern languages and translation, is key to executing campaigns that succeed across diverse European markets.
